Splashmaps

SplashMaps were on show at the Outdoors Show in London but I completely missed them!  I have since read a couple of articles on the Splashmap and thought how could I have missed that!  But I guess however carefully you walk round an exhibition centre you’ll always miss something!  Splashmaps is a great concept, their thought is that traditional maps aren’t designed for the outdoors, a paper map gets dirty, ripped and wet, a plastic coated map is bulky and difficult to carry.

Enter the SplashMap, a fabric map, this makes it lightweight and durable.  The creators are even seen wearing it as a bandana while mountain biking!

The above You Tube clip shows a BBC News feature on Kickstarter a crowdsourced funding site which Splashmaps used to gain enough funding to attend the Outdoors Show and produce a new map.

The Maps

You won’t recognise any of these maps, they are not your traditional 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 maps, they have combined Ordnance Survey data and Open Streetmap data to create a map specalised to the needs of an outdoor adventurer!  This means the scale is actually 1:40 000, a scale that they describe as the sweet spot between having enough detail to know where you are, but being a large enough scale so you can cover a decent distance with just the one map.

Today SplashMaps are just starting out, they have two maps available to purchase directly on their website - The Western South Downs and the New Forest, they plan to continue to expand the range with maps of the National Parks of Great Britain, site-centred maps and maps of other parts of the world!

What do you think?

What do you think?  Would you find a fabric map an essential or do you find a traditional map just fine and see no need to change?  Leave a comment and let everyone know.